A one-year free trial of BBMe is currently available in the Apple app store, but BlackBerry could start charging for its services in the future. As an alternative, you can use BBM Enterprise. The company peaked in with 52 million smartphones sold, but it succumbed to competition from Apple and Android phones.
But instead of falling by the wayside, BlackBerry instead pivoted. The company tried to revitalize its brand by focusing on software and security, even planning to take its software beyond phones and into everyday devices like washers and dryers.
See our ethics statement. My favorite phone of all time is the BlackBerry Bold It became a defining characteristic on BlackBerry devices and forever changed how business and casual conversations were held by phone users. People could choose to use a BBM account tied to their unique BlackBerry Pin rather than send a standard text message.
BBM managed to take traditional desktop messaging and translate it to the tiny computers in our pockets. It was astounding. The text bubbles were cluttered, the user interface felt clunky when navigating between messages, and if the wheel on your BlackBerry got stuck, good luck scrolling through messages. I got my Bold in I was in the 10th grade and, like everyone else, my life revolved around my phone.
My friends and I texted every single day and night. We all had BlackBerrys. Some people got new devices from their parents as birthday gifts, others used old recycled phones. Through BBM, those individual text messages soon morphed into elaborate, endless group chats.
We became a perfect batch of new BlackBerry users. RIM already made a name for itself among businesses and governments, but then it started reaching a crucial new audience: young consumers.
By , BBM had 60 million monthly active users. My friends and I were some of the earliest ones. It sounds silly to say today, when WhatsApp has more than a billion users and group chats are part of our daily lives, but back then, it was sensational. We became close through constant group chats with our pals, and eventually, we split off into direct messaging. It was ridiculous and exhilarating. There was no difference for me at 15 between my physical relationship with this person and our life on BBM.
If anything, the latter felt even more intimate and safe. Early messages on the Crackberry forum are full of people trying to sum up why BBM felt better to use than standard text messages.
This led the company into fights with law enforcement agencies , which wanted access to that ability. This article is more than 2 years old. Consumer version of BBM will cease but app aimed at businesses will continue.
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